Information Age (London, UK) articles from February 2002

Information Age (London, UK) archives from February 2002

Siebel loses momentum.(Siebel Systems Inc)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Full-year revenue and profit growth at Siebel Systems was overshadowed by concerns that the customer relationship management software leader was struggling to sustain its customer win-rate. For the year to December 2001, Siebel reported a rise...

Microsoft talks of weakness.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Second quarter results from technology bellwether Microsoft dashed hopes of a swift economic recovery as the software giant warned of further weakness in its largest markets. Nevertheless, the US behemoth reported record revenues of $7.7...

Creating and Capturing Value.("Creating and Capturing Value: Perspectives and Cases on Electronic Commerce" by Garth Saloner and Michael Spence)(Review)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... The over-reaching ambition of online grocer Webvan - and its subsequent failure - came to epitomise the absurdity of the dot-com bubble. Founded in 1996, the San Francisco-based company provided its customers with an online service for ordering...

PeopleSoft rounds out its CRM suite.(customer relationship management)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Enterprise applications vendor PeopleSoft is scrambling to flesh out its customer relationship management (CRM) offerings. In January 2001, it bought privately held marketing automation software developer Annuncio for an undisclosed sum. This...

Mixed fortunes for security vendors.(Internet security vendors)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Mixed results from security software vendors suggest that the expected boom in security-related purchases has yet to materialise to lift the sector out of the doldrums. Israel-based Internet security vendor Check Point Software pointed to...

Systems giants bruised by downturn.(steep fall in revenues for top-tier systems vendors)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Steep falls in quarterly revenues and profits at top-tier systems vendors revealed the extent of the decline in corporate IT spending. A few bold executives proffered tentative signs of an upturn; but none proved convincing. Sales fell...

Net Attitude.(Review)
February 10, 2002... If The Internet for Dummies had not already been published, John Patrick would have had the perfect title for his first book. Instead, we have Net Attitude, a bluffer's guide to the Internet, web services and ecommerce for the CEO and CIO who...

Tibco reduces the competition with Talarian buy.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Enterprise application integration software vendor Tibco is buying message-oriented middleware (MOM) vendor Talarian for $115 million in cash and stock, a deal that analysts agree makes sense for Tibco. However, opinions on the effect this will...

Spending will pick up.(forecast information technology projects)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... The majority of companies that delayed or cancelled IT projects in 2001 intend to resume spending during the first half of 2002, say analysts at AMR Research. Of these companies, 16% expect spending to recommence in the first quarter of 2002,...

E-procurement cuts purchase-to-fulfilment cycles.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Using e-procurement software applications for indirect purchasing can result in a reduction of between 70% and 80% in purchase-to-fulfilment cycles, says an Aberdeen Group report. Indirect e-procurement applications automate and support the...

Support response speeds often disappoint.(Forrester Research survey)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
February 10, 2002... Organisations pour substantial time and money into implementing enterprise applications, and expect quality support once the software is up and running. On the whole, they are relatively satisfied, say analysts from IT market research company...

Europe's Web performance still lags the US.
February 10, 2002... When it comes to fulfilling online orders, Internet retailers in Europe currently offer roughly the same level of performance as US sites did in 1999, according to researchers at IT services company Accenture. In the run-up to the 2001 holiday...

Linux buying patterns starting to emerge.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Competitive differentiation in the Linux software market is based on the ability of vendors to provide add-on utilities and support services, since they are obliged to distribute the operating system for free. And as the software and services...

Time lost through network failure.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... IT downtime may be costing UK organisations as much as [pound]38 billion a year, claims network services specialist Dimension Data. According to Dimension Data's pan-European survey of 450 executives in nine countries, 92% of respondents claim...

Wireless access to email is the next goal.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Email is the application that IT managers most want to offer via wireless wide area networks (WANs). According to a survey commissioned by research company Outlook 4Mobility, 43% of IT managers from US organisations that are using or testing...

Underworked and overpaid.(business applications software)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... In January 2002, at database and applications giant Oracle's annual European user conference in Amsterdam, CEO Larry Ellison made a characteristically bold statement. "We're throwing away the price book," he announced. "Effective immediately,...

Spam with everything.(unsolicited mass emailings)
February 10, 2002... Often, it is only when the CEO starts receiving emails for 'herbal viagra', 'animals in action' and 'the best legal money making scheme ever' that a company starts to act. Such spam - unsolicited mass emailings - not only makes a mockery...

Chemical industry 'super-hub' may be on horizon.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... The acquisition of Houston-based chemicals industry consortium e-marketplace CheMatch, by its rival San Francisco-based ChemConnect in January 2002, has caused analysts to speculate over the future creation of chemical industry 'super-hub'. ...

CGEY goes in search of refreshed agenda.(Cap Gemini Ernst and Young)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Cap Gemini's $11 billion ([Euro]12.4bn) takeover of US-based Ernst & Young's consulting business in May 2000 was arguably the right acquisition, at the wrong time. The goal was certainly strategic: to turn the largely European IT services group...

E-market watch.(electronic commerce)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Collaboration Some of the largest 'spot-buying' e-marketplaces are beginning to face up to the need to provide members with in-depth collaborative tools, as participants start to question the value of hubs which offer only auctioning...

Together forever?
February 10, 2002... The relationship between enterprise software giant SAP and its partner, e-procurement and e-marketplace software supplier Commerce One, has been the subject of much scrutiny and analysis for at least 12 months. While some have expected SAP to...

The Information Age Interview - Asda@home.(UK supermarket Asda launches online shopping services)
February 10, 2002... About the company UK supermarket Asda was relatively late to launch its online shopping operation, choosing to 'wait and see' how its competitors fared and learn from their mistakes. What Asda discovered, says chief technology officer Iain...

Profitability or bust - Mercator struggles on.
February 10, 2002... It is make or break time for Mercator. Once a leading vendor of enterprise application integration tools, the past four years have seen the company stumble financially and strategically. Now armed with a fresh suite of products and a brand new...

Systinet offers free web services.
February 10, 2002... The IT industry has big expectations of web services, a programming model that will offer application functions as a set of services available over the Internet. So too does Systinet. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, the company was...

Practique tackles incentive management headaches.(Practique Associates)
February 10, 2002... Jo Walker and Steve Bowe, the founders of UK-based Practique Associates, have been customer relationship management (CRM) practitioners since the 1980s, long before the term was even invented. "In those days it was called client management...

Lumio sheds light on customer behaviour.
February 10, 2002... In recent years, academia in Europe has become an increasingly fertile breeding ground for innovative technology start-ups. But few have had the kind of recognition that has been bestowed on Lumio. The company, originally known as MINEit...

Coleman claims turnaround at Systems Union.(Paul Coleman, CEO of financial software group Systems Union)
February 10, 2002... Paul Coleman, CEO of financial software group Systems Union, is almost too embarrassed to talk about why he joined the company. That was in early 2000, when the company was little more than a low-rent ecommerce developer known as Freecom.net....

Compaq relies on services for real growth.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
February 10, 2002... The past six months have been trying for most companies, but especially for Compaq Computer. Not only has Hewlett-Packard's proposed acquisition of the company been dogged by setbacks, but the uncertainty surrounding the merger has forced many...

Cedar's last hope for profits rests with Alchemy.(Alchemy Partners)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
February 10, 2002... It is every IT manager's nightmare: their trusted supplier descends from being a high-flying enterprise software and services vendor to a company on the brink of insolvency within six months. That is what has happened at Cedar Group of the UK....

Tough on the causes of crime.(hackers)
February 10, 2002... "We're a lot like undertakers," says Cliff May, a computer forensics specialist at IT security company Integralis. "People only call us when they've got a problem." May has been working in computer forensics for 15 years, and during that time,...

The protect and survive imperative.
February 10, 2002... The collapse of a flagship UK government training scheme in November 2001 because of widespread fraud and abuse contains lessons for organisations of all sizes. Not least because, according to IT services company Capita - which held the...

Readers' letters.(Letter to the Editor)
February 10, 2002... Wild ambition Howard Smith's vision of integrated process management tools (see Abstract Thinking) is laudable. However, it is wildly ambitious given that most UK companies' finite IT resources and their preoccupation with surviving...

Supplier scrutiny.
February 10, 2002... How does your organisation select which suppliers to do business with? Does it select them on the basis of price, quality, or delivery times? Can managers accurately measure the historical performance of individual suppliers? To what extent can...

Beware vendors bearing analyst reports.(waiting for report on Microsoft, Linux)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Few analyst reports will be more eagerly awaited this year than DH Brown's "investigation" into the relative costs of running Microsoft's Windows operating system compared to its open source rival Linux. Not least because although the report...

Pushed off Cloud Nine.(UK-based ISP was the victim of a prolonged denial of service attack)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Nothing illustrates the importance of a well-designed network combined with a robust security policy as well as the case of Internet service provider (ISP) Cloud Nine. The Basingstoke, UK-based ISP was the victim of a prolonged denial of...

SAS Institute to introduce 'lie detector' software.(SAS Text Miner)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 10, 2002... Managers will soon be able to detect automatically when an email contains lies, uncertainty, or anger, according to business intelligence tools vendor SAS Institute. SAS is currently testing new 'text mining' software that it plans to launch in...

Proof positive.
February 10, 2002... As every organisation knows, there is a difference between taking an order and getting paid for that order. For companies selling goods or services online, the possibility of a customer saying they did not place an order - either because of a...

Tibco customers take lessons from Enron.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Executives at integration tools vendor Tibco have doubtless been watching recent events at bankrupt US energy giant Enron with some interest. Many of them will have thought back to the company's 2001 user conference, Strategic Directions 2001,...

Collaborative commerce reality check.
February 10, 2002... Enthusiasm for collaborative commerce initiatives may be running high, but translating that into strategic projects is proving another matter. Research by Information Age, in association with Oracle, shows that commitment to areas such as B2B...

The books top technologists are reading.(Amazon.com's list)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... Online bookseller Amazon.com's list of the bestselling books at many of the world's best-known companies, makes for interesting and often revealing reading. It also raises a few questions about the work-life balance of many of their employees....

IT recession bottoming out?(Information Technology)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2002... The year-long slide of the IT industry may be coming to an end. The Infoconomy Index, which measures the sector's overall growth rate based on the financial results of the 200 largest companies, slipped again in January to -14.1%, down from...

Candle's Omegamon extends its reach.(Omegamon XE)(Product Announcement)
February 10, 2002... Candle has an unrelenting focus: performance and availability management. Over two decades, the world's second largest privately-held software company has progressively extended its reach beyond its origins in the mainframe arena -- where its...

Sanctum promises application layer security.(AppShield network security software)
February 10, 2002... Gil Raanan is following in the footsteps of almost every software company to emerge from Israel. He spent his military service building highly-sophisticated applications for the Israeli army, and realised this expertise could be put to use in a...

Making It Personal.
February 10, 2002... Making it Personal: How to profit from personalisation without invading privacy by Bruce Kasanoff, owes much to the earlier work of Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. In their seminal 1993 book, The One-to-One Future, they provided a detailed...